Five Takeaways from a Daily Writing Challenge

The “31 days of 5-minute free writes” October challenge has come and gone. Among other things, I never really got consistent about “31” or “Thirty-one,” “5-minute, “five-minute,” or “five minute,” but at least I was consistent about my writing commitment.

This is what occurs to me after 155 accumulated minutes of writing:

I like pondering a concept in advance of writing about it.

I got involved in the October challenge due to my affiliation with the Five Minute Friday community. Typically, there is not much time between learning the FMF prompt and writing to it. With this challenge, I had all 31 prompts from Day One.

Although I like spontaneously responding to a prompt, it also shaped my month to be reflecting on concepts like truth, brave, and connect in advance.

I like changing things up.

It didn’t take long after the challenge began for me to start thinking of novel approaches. There was the day I handwrote my response, for example. Then the day I spent the five minutes verbally presenting my contribution via Facebook live (and then transcribing it — I speak much more rapidly than I type — that day’s entry was roughly double the length of any other).

I also found I needed (wanted?) to have a fresh, novel image for each day. Although I had created an image that I planned to be the “hallmark” image of the series, I hardly  used it. For one thing, I wanted something different to populate every day when I posted the piece of the day to social media.

I may have gotten dependent on images.

This is truly a concern of mine — one that the challenge didn’t dispel.

I can think of very few posts I have written in the past several years that I didn’t somehow anchor with an image. Now, there’s nothing wrong with images, but I believe one of the goals of a writer should be to paint a picture with words.

Have I become more of a “look at this pink flower — isn’t it pretty?” writer than an “I could almost see the cotton candy fibers spinning into place as I pondered the pink hue of that blossom — even though we were nowhere near a fairground” kind of author?

Obviously the only way to improve my ability to describe with words instead of pictures is to practice. And learn. And have people critique my writing. But writing daily for five minutes at a time made me hyperaware as I scrambled over to Pablo many of the days to whip up a quick image, even if it only distantly related to my topic.

This image for my “follow” prompt, for example, is pretty but what does that leaf have to do with a conversation I had with a former Executive Director of an agency I volunteered at/worked for?

People who comment are the best!

Commenting seems to be a dying practice. I read so many great blogs that have very few responses, if any at all. It does take time to comment, but as a writer, I know I appreciate each and every one. Tara of Praying on the Prairie commented on most, if not all, of my posts. It was like a little tiny pat on the back each time I read one of  her affirming notes. Thanks, Tara.

I love writing.

When I took on the challenge, I shared in the introductory post about how I have a goal of cutting down on writing for others for free and trying to secure more paid writing assignments. I couldn’t resist this challenge, though!

I am at a time in my life that I love waking up to start my morning part-time job (thanks, SmartBrief), but waking up to write for five minutes (BEFORE CAFFEINE EVEN) made waking up even better.

Before doing the challenge, I would possibly have argued with you if you had suggested I could put together coherent thought at 5:45 am without the aid of caffeine. But I’m here to tell you I apparently can!

(What I can’t/won’t do, though, is the next frontier: NaNoWriMo — a challenge to write a book in the month of November. The pending house listing, the lack of a clear idea of what I want to write, and a smidgen of fear topped off with a dash of insecurity are all barriers. It won’t happen this November, but that book will happen.)

I found this quote/image when looking for a quote with which to close, and although it is not as overt about writing as some other quotes I saw, this gets most directly at the reason I write and the reason I loved this challenge.

The act of writing (and sharing the writing) keeps me thinking. I suppose I would have “thought” whether I wrote or not, but writing makes me nudge the thinking into the world.

And when the thinking is out in the world, fading away is much less likely.

Paula Kiger

Wife of one, Mom of two, Friend of many. My pronouns are she/her/hers.